He first shot to prominence for his role organizing protests in 2011 and 2012, seizing on frustrations over allegations of electoral fraud and over Putin’s return to the Kremlin for a third presidential term.
Those protests garnered mass support with some of the demonstrations in Moscow attracting crowds of tens of thousands. Navalny coined a phrase by describing the ruling United Russia party as the “party of thieves and crooks,” which then became a slogan for his supporters.
His potential to become a genuine threat to Putin first became clear in 2013, when he won more than a quarter of the Moscow mayoral vote against the Kremlin’s candidate.
Since then, he never ceased to be a thorn in the Kremlin’s flank.
Methods to silence Navalny evolved in lockstep with his rise in stature, with the authorities becoming ever more heavy-handed.
He was barred from state media and slapped with embezzlement charges, which resulted in a suspended sentence for him and jailtime for his brother, in what many saw as a blackmail attempt to sideline him from political life.
Perhaps most importantly, he and his team mastered the digital age, combining political activism with entertainment in snappy YouTube videos, exposing Russia’s political elite as corrupt and degenerate and smashing the aura of inviolability around Putin and his cronies.
They inspired a number of memes and symbols of protest. There was the golden toilet brush in reference to a roughly $800 accessory identified in a lavish Black Sea residence allegedly owned by Putin.
There were sneakers and rubber ducks in a nod to former President Dmitry Medvedev’s penchant for ordering clothing online and a large duck house on his estate.
Corgis became a motif after former First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov’s undeclared business jet, which his wife used to fly her short-legged canines to dog shows across the world.
His team scored another widely tracked success with a prank call to the son of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine pretending to be a military official telling him to report for duty the next day, to which Nikolai Peskov answered he would “obviously not” and said the question would be resolved “on a different level.”
Over the years, the Russian authorities increasingly resorted to violence to suppress opposition. Street protests were met with police beatings and prison sentences for the participants.
“Is Crimea some sort of sausage sandwich to be passed back and forth? I don’t think so,” he said.
But in Russian circles, the poison attack largely put that criticism on hold and consolidated his status as the country’s main opposition politician.
Navalny miraculously survived the poisoning and came back with a vengeance.
In his first interview after regaining consciousness, he even ridiculed the government for the bungled assassination attempt, joking with journalist Yury Dud that “none of Putin’s projects are successful.”
In a video investigation together with the Bellingcat investigative site, he then exposed the plot to kill him and went as far as tricking one of the Russian agents involved into a phone confession.
It was yet another humiliation for the Kremlin, revealing Russia’s security services as incompetent and mocking their tactics. (The poison had apparently been smeared on his boxer shorts.)
His health was known to be deteriorating in detention. He has spent 295 days of the past three years in an isolation cell — the last time only several days before his death. In January, he looked gaunt in a video released from yet another conference court hearing, this time held at the so-called Polar Wolf maximum security prison 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where he’d been transferred after being handed a 19-year prison sentence.
After his death, fears are now likely to spread to the safety of Vladimir Kara-Murza, another prominent opponent of Putin, who languishes in prison.
Putin, it seemed had won.
And yet Navalny didn’t think so. And as long as he didn’t, neither did a group of Russians.
Through his lawyers, he managed to keep an active presence on social media (for which they themselves are now facing persecution, with three lawyers in jail and two in exile) periodically sharing his two cents on current affairs and continuing to outline his view of the “wonderful Russia of the future.”
He used his endless court hearings as a political platform to call upon Russians not to lose hope and to crack jokes at the expense of Putin’s regime — at one point recounting a scene from “Harry Potter” in which a character tells the wizard not to feel lonely, because “that’s what Voldemort would have wanted.”